What I’ve been reading

i) I’ve completed The Collected works of Leo Tolstoi, a book I’ve mentioned before.

The book has 728 pages and it also has a big variance in quality. It spans from boring to excellent, but even if the lit-profs would have you think otherwise, there’s no way around the fact that the years have been rather hard on some of it, particularly when it comes to the short stories (called ‘tales’ in the book). That said, I liked the abridged version of Anne Karenine as well as some of the novellas the best, and they are excellent; I think I shall have to get the full version of the former at some point, it’s amazingly well written.

ii) I’ve read some more of Origin… by Darwin, mentioned in the link above as well. I hate to read books online, so it’s going rather slowly, I’ve still only read a couple hundred pages by now.

iii) I’ve read the second installment in Peter Øvig Knudsen’s project Blekingegadebanden, Den hårde kerne. It’s a good read, but I don’t have the book with me at the moment so I don’t feel comfortable discussing it [danske læsere henvises til Jalving's anmeldelse på berlingske].

iv) Leland Yeager, The fluttering Veil – Essays on monetary disequilibrium. It’s been on my shelf for more than a year, but I’ve simply not gotten around to reading it until now.

I thought it was a good read, but people who do not have some degree of training in economics and know a little about monetary theory will not get much out of it. I am probably myself in the lower quadrant of the skill-spectrum of those who stands to benefit from reading this book. Of course the book is a collection of essays, so there’s some variation as to how difficult/accessible the different sections are, but be that as it may, it still isn’t a book for the average 12.th grader.

As it is, I find that it would be much too far-reaching for me to make a long post about this book, and where I agree and disagree with Yeager, so it shall suffice for me to say that if you find monetary theory interesting, this is not a bad place to start looking a little deeper into it. On the whole though, I very much liked Yeager’s emphasis on monetary disequilibrium, as I have always found the ‘always equilibrium’/'instant clearing in the money markets’-assumption in most macro models, well, problematic. Besides from that I don’t have much to say, perhaps I’ll discuss a particular subject or two treated in the book later, but no promises.

Hahaha…

Den seneste kronik i 180 hedder “Hvordan vi hurtigst muligt får et mere liberalt Danmark“.

Jeg nåede ikke længere end til underoverskriften, så fik jeg et latteranfald der gjorde, at jeg var ved at spilde kaffe ud over mit tastatur: VU-formand Thomas Banke fortæller, hvorfor alle, der vil et liberalt Danmark, bør melde sin ind i Venstre.

Sunder mig stadig…

Financial illiteracy

From the freakonomics blog:

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow?

a. More than $102
b. Exactly $102
c. Less than $102
d. Do not know

2. Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1 percent per year and inflation was 2 percent per year. After 1 year, would you be able to buy more than, exactly the same as, or less than today with the money in this account?

a. More than today
b. Exactly the same as today
c. Less than today
d. Do not know

3. Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”

a. True
b. False
c. Do not know

[...]

Those three questions are the ones that Lusardi, along with Olivia Mitchell of Penn, have been inserting in a variety of major U.S. surveys. In a new working paper titled “Financial Literacy: An Essential Tool for Informed Consumer Choice?”, Lusardi writes that among respondents age 50 and older, only half of them got the first two answers right and only one-third of them got all three answers right.

…

I’d love to see some Danish numbers on this…

En dansk porkbuster

Kjeld Hansen skriver om fødevareministerens seneste bedrifter her. Fødevareministeren har blandt andet givet en kvart million til et internationalt maskebal på Ærø og 100.000 til et fællessangsarrangement i Rødekro.

Jeg har ikke noget intelligent at føje til, udover at dette måske må siges at være et godt tidspunkt for folk der er medlemmer af Venstre, og finder den slags politik, hrm, problematisk, at genoverveje deres medlemsskab. Eva Kjer hører til blandt de relativt liberale medlemmer af det parti.

Training Guide for Hate Crime Data Collection

While prejudice is an attitude, discrimination is a behavior. Generally, discriminatory behavior is the result of a prejudicial attitude. However, this is not always the case. One’s behavior is, in large measure, a product of one’s beliefs. Individuals generally act consistently with their inner values and convictions. However, there are other more external motivating factors which also influence an individual’s behavior. Some of these external factors result from particular societal influences distinct from one’s own beliefs. In other words, just as not every prejudicial attitude or belief results in a hostile action, not every discriminatory practice is the result of personal prejudice.

There are examples of racism and sexism that result not so much from an active, hostile personal prejudice as from specific institutional practices that discriminate. These exist even where there is no actual intent on the part of a specific person to discriminate against a group. Consider the law enforcement agency that has as part of its physical requirements, a minimum and maximum height requirement: no less than 5′ 10″, no more than 6′ 3″. If these height requirements were not specifically related to the normal, everyday demands of the job, but intended to exclude certain nationalities as well as women, they would be discriminatory: racist and sexist. Even if this discrimination was not intended, the allegation of discrimination could be made. And so racism could be defined in two ways: It is the individual’s prejudicial attitude and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given race, or it is an institutional practice, even if not motivated by prejudice, that subordinates people of a given race. Likewise sexism can be viewed in the same fashion. It can be either the individual’s prejudicial attitude and discriminatory behavior toward people of a given sex, or an institutional practice, even if not motivated by prejudice, that subordinates people of a given sex.

From this gem: Training Guide for Hate Crime Data Collection. Very enlightening.

Seriously?

When skimming the comment section of a post over at reason.com, I came across this link. The link is to VHEMT: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

My first thought was: Seriously? What the *#!%¤*^*??

My second thought was: Some people are just weird!

My third thought was: Joining a movement like this gotta be one of the worst possible ways to accomplish the stated goal of human extinction. Right now I’m pretty close to thinking it’s probably worse than doing nothing. If you really wanted mankind to go extinct, you’d work as hard as you could to start a nuclear war between Russia and The United States, try to develop an extremely contagious and untreatable human virus with a 100% kill ratio, or maybe try to develop a hostile AI like Skynet. To try and convince people to let their species go extinct will never work. The ‘voluntary’ part of the name totally destroys the movements credibility, if you want mankind to go extinct, you need to be prepared to kill all those annoying people who do not share your vision – otherwise you’ll surely fail. They claim they are serious about it – well, either they drop the voluntary part, or they drop the extinction part – then I’ll believe them, and figure they are either just antinatalists, or dangerous screwballs. As it is, the stated goals are in conflict with each other, and this makes them look, well, stupid.

If some of the members are sensible enough to understand that humankind as a whole won’t ‘go quietly’ – well then they would not have joined a movement with such a stupid name, but still – and their ideal is more alike ‘the fewer people the better’, it’s still a stupid and woefully inefficient way to promote that cause. They need a God-entity where they currently have their arguments. If you want fewer people here on earth, the best you could do would probably be to start an antinatalist religion. That’s what I would do. “700 virgins up there if you don’t have any children – and free cable…” – try and beat that Mohammed! If that didn’t take off, I’d (if I shared that vision) contemplate donating all my money and everything I could scrape together, and give all of it to the dirt poor people in the world. Really poor people have a lot of children, the not-quite-so-poor people have fewer children, both in the short and the long run (infant mortality never fully counteract the income effect). A monetary donation to a number of poor families in the third world would in my view make a much larger impact on the total number of humans over time than pretty much anything VHEMT would be able to come up with.

Bad news from across the pond

The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

That’s Friday a week ago, but I didn’t know about it, I must have missed it somehow – more here, via. Glenn Reynolds.

Gore’s zero carbon idea

“In a speech yesterday here in Washington, Al Gore challenged the United States to “produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun, and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable, and transformative.” (Well, the goal is at least one of those things.) Gore compared the zero-carbon effort to the Apollo program. And the comparison would be economically apt if, rather than putting a man on the moon—which costs about $100 billion in today’s dollars—President Kennedy’s goal had been to build a massive lunar colony, complete with a casino where the Rat Pack could perform.“

Link, via CafeHayek.

I also really like Arnold Kling’s take on Gore’s idea: for the same folks that can give us a risk-free financial system, affordable housing, universal health care, and everyone getting a college degree, it should be a piece of cake.

A game

I have done it before, I shall do it again unless I am told otherwise. Original game in bold, annotations in italics:

‘Kunik’ (anonymous Polish player, server rating 2125) – ‘US’, friendly game of blitz, 3+0, Van ‘t Kruijs Opening:

1.e3…e5,
2.d4…exd4,
3.exd4…Nf6,
4.Nf3…d5,
5.Bd3…Nc6,
6.h3…Bd6,
7.Nc3

…Be6,
8.Ne2…Qe7 (I didn’t play the opening correctly here, having been taken completely off guard by that weird first move. If the queen is to move to the open e-file, it should do so with a check – instead, in the game I move my Queen to an open file after first having blocked the check myself with my own bishop. Stupid – to make matters even better, the bishop is obviously not needed on the e6-square, as white has chosen not to play c4 early on.),
9.c3…h6 (I very much disliked the idea of Bg5),
10.a4…a6,
11.b4…0-0,
12.0-0…Rac8,
13.Bf4…Qd7
14.Bxd6…cxd6 (Qxd6 is probably a bit stronger, but if that was my intention to begin with then why would I have moved the rook to the c-file? It seems to me that the weak c-pawn gives reasonable compensation for the double pawns)

15.Ng3…Ne7,
16.Rc1…b5,
17.axb5…axb5,
18.Qe2…Rb8,
19.Rfe1…Nc8,
20.Qc2…Nb6,
21.Ne2…Nc4,
22.Nf4…Rfe8,

23.Re2…g5?!
24.Nxe6…Rxe6,
25.Rce1…Rbe8,
26.Nd2…Rxe2,
27.Rxe2….Rxe2,
28.Bxe2…Qe6,
29.Kf1…Ne4,
30.Nf3…g4 (the computer suggests Ng3+ here, and it’s certainly better for black, ie. 31.Ke1 (forced, 31.fxg3??…Ne3+! and if 31.Kg8 the bishop is lost)…Na3, 32.Qd3…Nxe2, 33.Qxe2…Nb1, 34.Qxe6…fxe6

- this should probably be won for black)
31.hxg4…Qxg4,
32.Ne5??

…Qh4? (Qf5!! and it would have been game over, as the white Queen is lost no matter what white does, ie. 33.Nf3…Ng3+ or Bd3…Ne6+ – alas, I didn’t find this move during the game. Likewise, Ncd2+ would have won as white is forced to sac the Queen for a knight in order to avoid forced mate, ie. 33.Ke1…Qxg2, 34.Bd3…(Bh5…Qf1++)Qg1+, 35.Ke2…Qf1+, 36.Ke3…Qf2++)
33.Bxc4…dxc4,
34.Nf3…Qh1+,
35.Ke2…d5 (once again, the g3-check is strong),
36.g3…Qg2,
37.Ke3…f5,
38.Ne5…Nxg3! (finally I found it!)

Time, 0-1 (I had 34 seconds left)

Twin Peaks!

Til dem der ikke allerede ved det: TV2 Zulu sender Twin Peaks i aften klokken 22.10. På oversigten står der det er afsnit #2, så de må have sendt første (dobbelt?)afsnit ved en tidligere lejlighed. Det er dog på ingen måde for sent at hoppe på.

Jeg gav i sin tid serien 10 ud af 10 på imdb. Den eneste anden serie der har haft den ære er Hanks’ og Spielberg’s Band Of Brothers. Serien er i høj grad anbefalelsesværdig.

…

Update:

Det lader til at Zulu også de følgende fredage vil følge Special Agent Dale Cooper, Horne-familien og The Log Lady tæt. Som sagt, det er ikke for sent at hoppe på. Her kan du finde resumeer af (blandt andet, lad ikke øjnene løbe for hurtigt ned ad siden) de første tre afsnit, så du ikke er helt fortabt.

Quote of the day

The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.

…

From the comment section of Eric Raymond’s weblog, via Samizdata. This one is good too:

there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.

Dagens citat

Jeg er mest til den rene vare. Så hvis det er et valg som tilbydes mig, vil jeg til enhver tid foretrække at blive styret af rendyrkede onde socialister fremfor socialister som kalder sig liberale eller giver indtryk af at være det (AFR). Det sikrer nemlig en sund opposition som holder de røde i skak. Situationen i dag er at alle trækker i samme retning, mod mere stat, mindre frihed og verdens højeste skattetryk. Socialisterne gør det fordi de vil den udvikling, og Venstre gør det fordi de er magtliderlige. Resultatet er, at unge mennesker aldrig udsættes for liberal tankegang når de følger den politiske debat og derfor forføres til at tro, at der ikke findes et alternativ. Til gengæld har AFR en flot bil at køre i.

…

Kristoffer Bohmann, i en udveksling med Christopher Arzrouni i kommentarsektionen her, hvor han i øvrigt også kalder sidstnævnte en nyttig idiot.

Nu bryder jeg mig ikke meget om udtryk som ‘rendyrkede onde socialister’ – den slags udtryk gør os dummere, ikke det modsatte. Men paradoksalt nok bør det dog bemærkes, på trods af brugen af et udtryk som dette, at der efter min opfattelse i citatet indsniger sig den uheldige implicitte antagelse, at venstrefløjen har det moralske overtag: Venstrefolkene er både magtliderlige og lyver om deres politiske præferencer, mens socialisterne bare ‘vil den udvikling’.

Har vi virkelig haft en ‘borgerlig’ regering så længe, at man helt har glemt hvad der sker, når det er den anden ‘fløj’, der har magten? De socialistiske politikere i opposition er præcis lige så magtliderlige som resten.

Well, it’s a theory…

One reason we might have a “health care crisis” and rising medical costs is that we turn away almost 97% of the applicants to medical schools.

Here’s the link.

Belief in belief

I started wondering if I’d ever linked to this post before or written about the subject, and I decided that I ought to correct the mistake in case I hadn’t.

The short story: Where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it.

Daniel Dennett has termed the belief that believing in X is ‘good’, ‘proper’, ‘virtuous’… – ‘belief in belief‘. According to Dennett, most people in the West don’t believe in God, what they believe is that they ought to believe in God. They believe in belief. Follow the links for more.

Oh, and yes, I know that a lot of atheists believe in belief too, just with opposite signs (‘people ought not to believe in God’). But there’s no need to add this observation in the comments or discussing it there, that observation has no influence on the validity of Dennett’s claim.

Hanlon’s razor

I’d never heard about it before, well not the name anyway, but it’s a good advice.

Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I would of course add …or ignorance.

Hahaha!

Randall Munroe strikes again:

“Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled until July 10, 2008 because a mention in a webcomic is causing significant disruption in the form of useless “in pop culture” sections.“

Here’s the article in question, here’s the comic (also displayed below).

LMAO!

Nævn din pris

Det her er tosset.

Ingen stemmer for deres blå øjnes skyld. Nogle stemmer symbolsk, fordi de godt ved deres stemme ikke gør nogen forskel. Men de fleste stemmer fordi de forventer en modydelse. At prisen ikke er udtrykt eksplicit i kroner og ører betyder ikke, at der ikke er nogen. Alle sælger deres stemme. De permanent arbejdsløse sælger stemmen til SF til gengæld for modydelsen højere overførselsindkomster, de konservative sælger deres stemme til politikerne i håb om skattelettelser, de offentligt ansatte sælger stemmen til de socialdemokratiske partier til gengæld for jobsikkerhed og lav arbejdstid…

Jeg vil på baggrund af artiklen stærkt overveje at sælge min stemme ved EU-afstemningen til efteråret. Nogle forslag til hvad prisen burde være? Jeg ligger lige nu et sted mellem 50 og 100 kroner.

Pascal’s wager revisited

I have previously written about how the ‘assume correct god’ objection destroys Pascal’s argument for believing in ‘God’ in principle. I’ll delve a bit deeper into this topic in the following. A particular feature of the model I first had in mind when discussing the subject was that I implicitly assumed an expected post-life utility of 0. You go to hell, that’s infinitely bad, you go to heaven, that’s infinitely wonderful, no gods means no afterlive, so all in all that would point to an expected post-life utility of zero. Believing in a God doesn’t change that, so no point in doing that. But is this argument correct? Let’s look a bit closer at the likelihoods.

The a prior expected post-life utility P(U) is: P(heaven)*U(heaven) – P(hell)*U(hell). [we don't need the 'no god' scenario in this calculation, just let U('afterlife' given no god)=0]

The utilities cancel out in the equation. But do the probabilities necessarily cancel out? I’d like to ponder this question a bit in the following.

The first thing to consider is that by picking monotheist god X, you loose the chance to bet on god Y (because god Y like God X do not like polytheists. We don’t consider the ‘no-hell’ alternatives here, they are not interesting). But if there’s an infinite amount of (potential) monotheist gods, which there is, it would seem that you would be ill adviced to bet on any of them. At first glance, it looks as if you pick a monotheist god, the likelihood of going to hell is infinity minus epsilon. If you assume that the likelihood of going to hell if you don’t believe is = 1, then of course you’re better off with a god than without one, but a difference of epsilon isn’t really anything to cheer about considering the outlook. The message here is: Pascal really should have focused more on hell, he really shouldn’t have wasted his time on heaven, the likelihood of any of us going to heaven given the above considerations is lower than the likelihood of me winning every lottery in Denmark for the next 100 years without ever buying a lottery ticket.

No, picking just one god doesn’t give you many winning chances at the lottery. So how do we improve the odds? Well, polytheism is a place to start. Picking at least a few different Gods would surely be a better idea than to stick with just one, that way you get to hedge your bet a little. But only a little. And you still have the problem that the monotheists might be right. Not only you might pick the wrong 10 gods, you still have the problem with the infinite amount of monotheist gods to deal with. This of course also leads back to an additional consideration when it comes to monotheism: By picking one god, you not only risk pissing off all the other monotheist gods, you might also anger Zeus and Vishnu. Yes, the likelihood of going to hell would still in such a model be 1 minus epsilon, but it sort of puts things in perspective, no? The other side of this coin is that even if you’re a polytheist, you can’t hedge your bet 100% by picking ‘all gods’ – even if you pick all the possible polytheist gods (which of course would be impossible) there would still be that infinite amount of annoying monotheist gods to deal with. Besides, for every ‘openminded/tolerant’ polytheist god you can think of, I can think of just as many that would never accept you worshipping both Odin and Zeus. Actually, the ‘hedging’ you’re doing isn’t really hedging at all, you just exchange one set of risks with another, without changing the overall risk level at all.

Now, it’s probably not true that the game is rigged so that we have such a low chance of picking the right God. God rigged the game himself, and for every god that invents a system rigged like this, I can think of a god that would rig it differently. So the problem of our low chance of success, which leads to an E(U-afterlife) much lower than zero, can thus be solved by stating the obvious fact that for every vindictive and egocentrical god that demands you worship him (/her) in order for you to go on to ‘eternal happiness’, there are just as many that just don’t give a damn what you do ‘down here’, they let you ‘move on’ no matter how much you abuse them during your life. In this way the expected post-life utility of zero can be restored.

One last thing to note. If any of the popular gods are true, those gods are necessarily ‘evil’ in that they all send a majority of humans to hell, keep on reincarnating us, or whatever else it is they do to punish us when we misbehave and don’t follow the divine plan, do as we’re told or whatever. Either your God-model, with a God that punishes unbelievers, is true, or God is good. You can’t have it both ways, for if you disagree, what we disagree about is the meaning of the word ‘good’. And if your model of God is the real deal, then that God to me is a terrible [something]. No matter which one(s): Pretty much all the Gods we humans have invented so far are a bunch of scumbags.

Quote of the day

…Even now the Cossack families claim relationsship with the Chechens, and the love of freedom, of leisure, of plunder and of war, still form their chief characteristics. Only the harmful side of Russian influence is apparent – by interference at elections, by confiscation of church bells, and by the troops who are quartered in the country, or march through it.

A Cossack is inclined to hate less the dzhigit hillsman, who maybe has killed his brother, than the soldier quartered on him to defend his village, but who has defiled his hut with tobacco smoke. He respects his enemy the hillsman, and despises the soldier; who is in his eyes an alien and an oppressor. In reality, from a Cossack’s point of view, a Russian peasant is a foreign, savage, despeciable creature, of whom he sees a sample in the hawkers who come to the country, and in the Little-Russian immigrants whom the Cossack contemptously calls “woolbeaters”.

…

From Tolstoy, The Cossacks.

When I read the above passage, the word ‘Iraq’ just popped into my head. I wonder why…

North Korea has a drug problem

This is news to me, even if some of you probably knew about it already. A long article with lots of interesting links is available here.